Saturday, February 16, 2013

Elon Musk, Gen X founder of PayPal and SpaceX, wants to retire on Mars and live as the poster boy for his next big business: colonizing Mars as a profitable venture. From a 2010 Guardian report:

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he's older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. "It would be a good place to retire," he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one's excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd's unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship.

Musk is planning to fund the first round of Mars missions with his personal fortune and spend his old age building the first Mars colony, anticipated population 80,000.
From the Space Review:

There’s a proposed SpaceX Mars mission called “Red
Dragon”. Elon Musk can fund a half dozen of these missions, at an estimated
price of $400 million, with his current fortune at retail prices. Six times
1,000 kilograms of payload to Mars seems like a very tight mass budget to handle
a retirement. Fortunately, the mass budget may rise as prices drop.

SpaceX has demonstrated
its Grasshopper vehicle, which has proven SpaceX’s mastery of vertical
landing. And there
are more hints of reusability, the Holy Grail that can get the cost of a
rocket flight down from greater than $100 million to less than $10 million. At
$100 per pound, a flight to orbit is competitive with a first-class flight to
Australia. But where is there to go?

Elon Musk: In 2002, once it became clear that PayPal was
going to get sold, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, the
entrepreneur Adeo Ressi, who was actually my college housemate. I’d been staying
at his home for the weekend, and we were coming back on a rainy day, stuck in
traffic on the Long Island Expressway. He was asking me what I would do after
PayPal. And I said, well, I’d always been really interested in space, but I
didn’t think there was anything I could do as an individual. But, I went on, it
seemed clear that we would send people to Mars. Suddenly I began to wonder why
it hadn’t happened already. Later I went to the NASA website so I could see the
schedule of when we’re supposed to go. [Laughs.]

Anderson: And of course there was nothing.

Musk:At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in
the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing. It
seemed crazy.

Anderson: NASA doesn’t have the budget for that anymore.

Musk:Since 1989, when a study estimated that a manned
mission would cost $500 billion, the subject has been toxic. Politicians didn’t
want a high-priced federal program like that to be used as a political weapon
against them.

Anderson: Their opponents would call it a boondoggle.

Musk: But the United States is a nation of explorers.
America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

Anderson: We all leaped into the unknown to get here.

Musk: So I started with a crazy idea to spur the national
will. I called it the Mars Oasis missions. The idea was to send a small
greenhouse to the surface of Mars, packed with dehydrated nutrient gel that
could be hydrated on landing. You’d wind up with this great photograph of green
plants and red background—the first life on Mars, as far as we know, and the
farthest that life’s ever traveled. It would be a great money shot, plus you’d
get a lot of engineering data about what it takes to maintain a little
greenhouse and keep plants alive on Mars. If I could afford it, I figured it
would be a worthy expenditure of money, with no expectation of financial return.

Even so, Wired confirms the wealth, power and almost frightening capability of someone who takes and makes dreams a literal reality:

When a man tells you about the time he planned
to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that
same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of
reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the
Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme
entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need
a little bit of both to really change the world.

All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important
than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological
investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-tolerant than
non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their
own visions, so much so that they think what they’re embarking on isn’t really
that risky. They’re wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong—to
willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary—no
one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new.

I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than
Elon Musk. All of the entrepreneurs I admire most—Musk, Jeff Bezos, Reed
Hastings, Jack Dorsey, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a
few others—have sought not just to build great companies but to take on problems
that really matter. Yet even in this class of universe-denters, Musk stands out.

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About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.